Life of John Keats Part 37

I caught a sight of the moon about 3 o'clock this morning--and ran down to tell the glad tidings--but the surly rolling of the sea was worse than the storm--the s.h.i.+p trembled to it--and the sea was scarcely calmed by daylight--so that we were kept from 2 o'clock yesterday until 6 this morning without anything--well it has done us good, we are like a Quartett of fighting c.o.c.ks this morning. The morning is serene we are now back again some 20 miles--waiting for a wind--but full of spirits--Keats is without even complaining and Miss Cottrell has a colour in her face--the sea has done his worst upon us.

I am better than I have been for years. Farewell my dear fellow.

J. SEVERN--show this to my family with my love to them.

When you read this you will excuse the manner--I am quite beside myself--and have written the whole this morning Thursday on the deck after a sleepless night and with a head full of care--you shall have a better the next time.

The storm had driven them back from off Brighton more than half way to the Downs, and then abated enough to let them land for a scramble on the s.h.i.+ngles at Dungeness, where they excited the suspicions of the coast guard, and to get the above letter posted from Romney. After this calms and contrary airs kept them beating about the channel for many more days yet. At Portsmouth they were held up again, and to pa.s.s the time Keats landed and went to call on Dilke's sister Mrs Snook at Bedhampton; again by ill chance barely missing Brown, whom he supposed to be still in Scotland but who was actually only ten miles away, having run down to stay with Dilke's father at Chichester. The next day, while the s.h.i.+p was still hanging in the Solent off Yarmouth, Keats wrote unbosoming himself to Brown of his inward agony more fully than he had ever done in speech:--

I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much--there is one I must mention and have done with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state? I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harping--you know what was my greatest pain during the first part of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. When the pang of this thought has pa.s.sed through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is pa.s.sed. I often wish for you that you might flatter me with the best.

I think without my mentioning it for my sake you would be a friend to Miss Brawne when I am dead. You think she has many faults--but, for my sake, think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at present in which woman merely as woman can have no more power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss Brawne and my sister is amazing. The one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible--the sense of darkness coming over me--I eternally see her figure eternally vanis.h.i.+ng. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?

There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.

That night, (September 28) adds Keats, they expected to put into Portland Roads; but calms again held them up, and again they were allowed to land, having made only some few miles' headway down the Dorsets.h.i.+re coast. The day of this landing was for Keats one of transitory calm and lightening of the spirit. The weather was fine, and 'for a moment,' says Severn, 'he became like his former self. He was in a part that he already knew, and showed me the splendid caverns and grottoes with a poet's pride, as though they had been his birthright.'

These are vivid phrases, that about the caverns and grottoes certainly a little over-coloured for the scene, which was Lulworth Cove and the remarkable, but scarcely splendid, rock tunnels and fissures of Stair Hole and Durdle Door. When Severn says that Keats knew the ground, one half wonders whether the Dorsets.h.i.+re Keatses may really have been kindred of his to whom he had at some time paid an unrecorded visit: or otherwise, whether in travelling to and from Teignmouth in 1818, taking, as we know he did, the southern route from Salisbury by Bridport and Axminster, he may have broken the journey at Dorchester and visited the curiosities of the coast. But in truth, to understand and possess beauties of nature as a birthright, Keats needed not to have seen them before. On board s.h.i.+p the same night Keats borrowed the copy of Shakespeare's Poems which he had given Severn a few days before, and wrote out fair and neatly for him, on the blank page opposite the heading _A Lover's Complaint_, the beautiful sonnet which every lover of English knows so well:--

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human sh.o.r.es, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-- No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Severn in later life clearly cherished the impression that the sonnet had been actually composed for him on the day of the Dorsets.h.i.+re landing. Lord Houghton in his _Life and Literary Remains_ distinctly a.s.serts as much, and it had seemed to us all a beautiful and consolatory circ.u.mstance, in the tragedy of Keats's closing days, that his last inspiration in poetry should have come in a strain of such unfevered beauty and tenderness, and with images of such a refres.h.i.+ng and solemn purity. But in point of fact the sonnet was work of an earlier date, and the autograph given to Severn is on the face of it no draught but a fair copy. Its original form had been this--

Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art!

Not in lone splendour hung amid the night; Not watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's devout sleepless Eremite, The morning waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human sh.o.r.es; Or, gazing on the new soft fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors:-- No;--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Cheek-pillow'd on my Love's white ripening breast, To touch, for ever, its warm sink and swell, Awake, for ever, in a sweet unrest; To hear, to feel her tender-taken breath, Half pa.s.sionless, and so swoon on to death.

The sonnet is copied in this form by Charles Brown, under date 1819, in the collection of transcripts from Keats's fugitive verses which from the spring of that year he regularly made as soon after they were written as he could lay hands on them. His dates I have found always trustworthy, and I have shown reason (above, p. 334) for holding the sonnet to have been written in the last week of February, 1819, and the first days of Keats's engagement to f.a.n.n.y Brawne. All that Keats can actually have done during that evening of tranquillity off Lulworth was to return to it in thought and recopy it for Severn with changes which in the second line heightened the remoteness of the star; in the fourth made an inverted metrical stress normal by subst.i.tuting 'patient' for 'devout'; in the fifth changed the word 'morning' into 'moving,'[2] in the tenth cancelled one of his defining and arresting compound participles in favour of a simpler phrase; and in the four concluding lines varied a little the mood and temperature of the longing expressed, calling for death not as the sequel to his longing's fulfilment, but as the alternative for it. In Severn's first mention of the subject, which is in a letter written from Rome a few weeks after Keats's death, he shows himself aware that Brown might be in possession already of a version of the sonnet, which of course could only have been the case if it had been composed before Keats left Hampstead. 'Do you know,' he writes, 'the sonnet beginning Bright Star etc., he wrote this down in the s.h.i.+p--it is one of his most beautiful things. I will send it, if you have it not.'

The rest of the voyage, after getting clear of the English Channel, was quick but uncomfortable, the weather variable and often squally. Signs of improvement in Keats's health alternated with alarming returns of haemorrhage, and the painful symptoms of his fellow-traveller Miss Cotterell preyed sometimes severely on his nerves and spirits. At other times his thoughts ran pleasantly on poems yet to be written, and especially on one he had planned on the story of Sabrina. 'He mentioned to me many times in our voyage', writes Severn within a few weeks of the poet's death, 'his desire to write this story and to connect it with some points in the English history and character. He would sometimes brood over it with immense enthusiasm, and recite the story from Milton's _Comus_ in a manner that I will remember to the end of my days.' It is good to think of Keats being thus able to occupy and soothe his fevered spirit with the lovely cadences that tell how Nereus pitied the rescued nymph,

And gave her to his daughters to imbathe In nectar'd lavers strew'd with Asphodel,

or with those that invoke her in the prayer,--

Listen where thou art sitting Under the gla.s.sie, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,--

it is good to think of this and to try and conceive what Keats while he was in health might have made of this English theme which haunted his imagination now and afterwards at Rome, when the power to shape and almost the power to live and breathe had left him.

Severn took during the voyage an opportunity to make a new drawing of Keats as he lay propped and resting on his berth. Such a drawing would have been an invaluable addition to our memorials of the poet: it remained long in the possession first of one and then of another of Severn's sons, but has of late years unluckily disappeared: stolen, thinks its latest owner, Mr Arthur Severn: let us hope that this mention may perhaps lead to its recognition and recovery. During some rough weather in the Bay of Biscay Keats began to read the s.h.i.+pwreck canto of _Don Juan_, but presently found its reckless and cynic brilliancy intolerable, and flung the volume from him in disgust. Perhaps something of his real feelings, but certainly nothing of his way of expressing them, is preserved in Severn's account of the matter written five-and-twenty years later:--

Keats threw down the book and exclaimed: 'this gives me the most horrid idea of human nature, that a man like Byron should have exhausted all the pleasures of the world so completely that there was nothing left for him but to laugh and gloat over the most solemn and heart-rending scenes of human misery, this storm of his is one of the most diabolical attempts ever made upon our sympathies, and I have no doubt it will fascinate thousands into extreme obduracy of heart--the tendency of Bryon's poetry is based on a paltry originality, that of being new by making solemn things gay and gay things solemn.'

In a calm off Cape St Vincent, Keats was delighted with the play of silken colours on the sea, and interested in watching the movement of a whale. The next day there came an alarm: a shot was fired over the bows of the 'Maria Crowther' from one of two Portuguese men of war becalmed close by; but drifting within hail one of the Portuguese captains explained that there were supposed to be privateers in those waters and that he only wanted to learn whether the Englishman had sighted any such.

On October 21, thirty-four days out from London, the 'Maria Crowther'

reached Naples harbour and was promptly put in quarantine. In that predicament her pa.s.sengers sweltered and fumed for ten full days, their number having been increased by the addition of a lieutenant and six seamen, who were despatched from an English man-of-war in the harbour to enquire as to the vessel's name and status, and having thoughtlessly gone on board her were forbidden by the port authorities to go off again. The friends found some alleviation from the tedium of the time through the kindness of Miss Cotterell's brother, a banker in Naples, who kept them supplied with all manner of dainties and luxuries, and especially with abundance of fruit and flowers. 'Keats', says Severn, 'was never tired of admiring (not to speak of eating) the beautiful cl.u.s.ters of grapes and other fruits, and was scarce less enthusiastic over the autumn flowers, though I remember his saying once that he would gladly give them all for a wayside dog-rose bush covered with pink blooms.' The time of detention pa.s.sed with a good deal of merriment, songs from the man-of-war's men on board, songs, laughter, and gibes from the Neapolitan boatmen swarming round. In all this Keats would join, feverishly enough it is evident, and declared afterwards that he had made more puns in the course of those ten days than in any whole year of his life beside. Once he flashed into a characteristic heat of righteous wrath, when the seamen took to trolling obscene catches in full hearing of the ladies. On the fourth day of their detention he wrote to Mrs Brawne, (to f.a.n.n.y he dared not write, nor suffer his thoughts to dwell on her at all), saying what he thought of his own state:--

We have to remain in the vessel ten days and are at present shut in a tier of s.h.i.+ps. The sea air has been beneficial to me about to as great extent as squally weather and bad accommodations and provisions has done harm. So I am about as I was. Give my love to f.a.n.n.y and tell her, if I were well there is enough in this Port of Naples to fill a quire of Paper--but it looks like a dream--every man who can row his boat and walk and talk seems a different being from myself. I do not feel in the world.

It is impossible to describe exactly in what state of health I am--at this moment I am suffering from indigestion very much, which makes such stuff of this Letter. I would always wish you to think me a little worse than I really am; not being of a sanguine disposition I am likely to succeed. If I do not recover your regret will be softened--if I do your pleasure will be doubled. I dare not fix my Mind upon f.a.n.n.y, I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case--the hair in a Locket--and the Pocket Book in a gold net. Show her this. I dare say no more. Yet you must not believe I am so ill as this Letter may look, for if ever there was a person born without the faculty of hoping I am he. Severn is writing to Haslam, and I have just asked him to request Haslam to send you his account of my health. O what an account I could give you of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world--I feel a spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly--O what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints!

Once released from quarantine and landed at Naples Severn wrote to Haslam fully his impressions of the voyage and of its effects on his friend.

Naples, Nov. 1 1820.

My dear Haslam,

We are just released from the loathsome misery of quarantine--foul weather and foul air for the whole 10 days kept us to the small cabin--surrounded by about 2,000 s.h.i.+ps in a wretched hole not sufficient for half the number, yet Keats is still living--may I not have hopes of him? He has pa.s.sed what I must have thought would kill myself. Now that we are on sh.o.r.e and feel the fresh air, I am horror struck at his sufferings on this voyage, all that could be fatal to him in air and diet--with the want of medicine and conveniences he has weather'd it, if I may call his poor shattered frame and broken heart weathering it. For myself I have stood it firmly until this morning when in a moment my spirits dropt at the sight of his suffering--a plentiful shower of tears (which he did not see) has relieved me somewhat--what he pa.s.sed still unnerves me. But now we are breathing in a large room with Vesuvius in our view--Keats has become calm and thinks favourably of this place for we are meeting with much kind treatment on every side--more particularly from an English gentleman here (brother to Miss Cottrell one of our lady pa.s.sengers) who has shown unusually humane treatment to Keats--unasked--these with very good accommodation at our Inn (Villa de Londra) have kept him up through dinner--but on the other hand Dr Milner is at Rome (whither Keats is proposing to go) the weather is now cold wet and foggy, and we find ourselves on the wrong side for his hope for recovery (for the present I will talk to him--he is disposed to it. I will talk him to sleep for he has suffered much fatigue).

Nov. 2.

Keats went to bed much recovered--I took every means to remove from him a heavy grief that may tend more than anything to be fatal--he told me much--very much--and I don't know whether it was more painful for me or himself--but it had the effect of much relieving him--he went very calm to bed.

Poor fellow! he is still sleeping at half past nine, if I can but ease his mind I will bring him back to England _well_--but I fear it never can be done in this world--the grand scenery here affects him a little--but he is too infirm to enjoy it--his gloom deadens his sight to everything--and but for intervals of something like ease he must soon end it--

You will like to know how I have managed in respect to self. I have had a most severe task full of contrarieties what I did one way was undone another. The lady pa.s.senger though in the same state as Keats--yet differing in const.i.tution required almost everything the opposite to him--for instance if the cabin windows were not open she would faint and remain entirely insensible 5 or 6 hours together--if the windows were open poor Keats would be taken with a cough (a violent one--caught from this cause) and sometimes spitting of blood, now I had this to manage continually for our other pa.s.senger is a most consumate brute--she would see Miss Cottrell stiffened like a corpse--I have sometimes thought her dead--nor ever lend the least aid--full a dozen times I have recovered this lady and put her to bed--sometimes she would faint 4 times in a day yet at intervals would seem quite well--and was full of spirits--she is both young and lively--and but for her we should have had more heaviness--though much less trouble. She has benefited by Keats's advice--I used to act under him--and reduced the fainting each time--she has recovered very much and gratefully ascribes it to us--her brother the same.

The Captain has behaved with great kindness to us all--but more particularly Keats--everything that could be got or done--was at his service without asking--he is a good-natured man to his own injury--strange for a captain I won't say so much for his s.h.i.+p--it's a black hole--5 sleeping in one cabin--the one you saw--the only one--during the voyage I have been frequently sea-sick--sometimes severely--2 days together. We have had only one real fright on the seas--not to mention continued squalls--and a storm. 'All's well that ends well,' and these ended well. Our fright was from two Portugese s.h.i.+ps of war--they brought us to with a shot--which pa.s.sed close under our stern--this was not pleasant for us you will allow--nor was it decreased when they came up--for a more infernal set I never could imagine--after some trifling questions they allowed us to go on to our no small delight--our captain was afraid they would plunder the s.h.i.+p--this was in the Bay of Biscay--over which we were carried by a good wind.

Keats has written to Brown--and in quarantine another to Mrs Brawne--he requests you will tell Mrs Brawne what I think of him--for he is too bad to judge of himself--this morning he is still very much better. We are in good spirits and I may say hopeful fellows--at least I may say as much for Keats--he made an Italian pun to-day--the rain is coming down in torrents.

The confession Keats had made to Severn was of course that of the effects of the pa.s.sion which had so long been racking and wasting him, and the violence of which he had shrunk till now from disclosing to friend or brother. Writing on the same day to Brown, he could not control or disguise the anguish of his heart.

Naples, 1 November 1820.

My dear Brown,

Yesterday we were let out of Quarantine, during which my health suffered more from bad air and the stifled cabin than it had done the whole voyage. The fresh air revived me a little, and I hope I am well enough this morning to write to you a short calm letter;--if that can be called one, in which I am afraid to speak of what I would fainest dwell upon. As I have gone thus far into it, I must go on a little; perhaps it may relieve the load of WRETCHEDNESS which presses upon me.

The persuasion that I will see her no more will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die--I cannot bear to leave her. O, G.o.d!

G.o.d! G.o.d! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her--I see her--I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in England; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again--Now!--O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her--to receive a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my heart--even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look for consolation or ease?

I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me. I am afraid to write to her--I should like her to know that I do not forget her. Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this end? G.o.d bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and George, and his wife, and you, and all!

During the four days they remained at Naples Keats received a second invitation in the kindest possible terms from Sh.e.l.ley to come and settle near him in Pisa, but determined to carry out his original plan of wintering at Rome, where he was to place Taylor's bill to his credit at Torlonia's and whither he carried a special introduction to Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark. Severn was also the bearer of one from Sir Thomas Lawrence to Canova. Keats attempted to amuse himself reading _Clarissa Harlowe_, and also seeing some of the sights of Naples. After almost a century there has lately come to light a record, set down at second-hand and probably touched up in the telling, of some things noticed and words spoken by the stricken poet in drives about the city and suburbs in the friendly company of Mr Charles Cotterell, the brother of his invalid fellow-pa.s.senger. Keats was driving, says the narrator, Mr Charles Macfarlane,--

--he was driving with Charles Cottrell from the Bourbon Museum, up the beautiful open road which leads up to Capo di Monte and the Ponte Rossi. On the way, in front of a villa or cottage, he was struck and moved by the sight of some rose trees in full bearing. Thinking to gratify the invalid, Cottrell, a ci-devant officer in the British Navy, jumped out of the carriage, spoke to somebody about the house or garden, and was back in a trice with a bouquet of roses. 'How late in the year! What an exquisite climate!' said the Poet; but on putting them to his nose, he threw the flowers down on the opposite seat, and exclaimed: 'Humbugs! they have no scent! What is a rose without its fragrance? I hate and abhor all humbug, whether in a flower or in a man or woman!' And having worked himself strongly up in the anti-humbug humour, he cast the bouquet out on the road. I suppose that the flowers were China roses, which have little odour at any time, and hardly any at the approach of winter.

Returning from that drive, he had intense enjoyment in halting close to the Capuan Gate, and in watching a group of lazzaroni or labouring men, as, at a stall with fire and cauldron by the roadside in the open air, they were disposing of an incredible quant.i.ty of macaroni, introducing it in long unbroken strings into their capacious mouths, without the intermediary of anything but their hands. 'I like this,'

said he; 'these hearty fellows scorn the humbug of knives and forks.

Fingers were invented first. Give them some _carlini_ that they may eat more! Glorious sight! How they take it in!'[3]

But the political state and servile temper of the Neapolitan people--though they were living just then under the const.i.tutional forms imposed on the Bourbon monarchy by the revolution of the previous summer--grated on Keats's liberal instincts, and misinterpreting at the theatre the sight of a couple of armed sentries posted (as was the custom of the time and country) on the stage, he broke into a fit of anger and determined suddenly to leave the place. Accordingly on the 4th or 5th of November the friends set out for Rome in a small hired carriage, which jogged so loiteringly on the road that Severn was able to walk beside it almost all the way. Keats suffered seriously at the stopping-places from bad quarters and bad food, and was for the most part listless and dispirited, but would become animated 'when an unusually fine prospect opened before us, or the breeze bore to us exquisite hill fragrances or breaths from the distant blue seas, and particularly when I literally filled the little carriage with flowers.

He never tired of these, and they gave him a singular and almost fantastic pleasure which was at times almost akin to a strange joy.'

Entering Rome by the Lateran gate they settled at once in lodgings which Dr Clark, to whom Keats had written from Naples, had already secured for them, in the first house on the right going up the steps from the Piazza di Spagna to Sta Trinita dei Monti. Here, according to the manner of those days in Italy, they were left pretty much to s.h.i.+ft for themselves. Neither could speak Italian, and at first they were ill served by the trattora from which they got their meals, until Keats, having bidden Severn see how he would mend matters, one day coolly emptied all the dishes out of the window, and handed them back to the porter: a hint, says Severn, which was quickly taken. For a while the patient seemed better. Dr Clark wished him to avoid the excitement of seeing the famous monuments of the city, so he left Severn to visit these alone, and contented himself with quiet strolls, chiefly on the Pincian close by.

The season was fine, and the freshness and brightness of the air, says Severn, invariably made him pleasant and witty. Clark gave Severn an introduction to Gibson, the then famous American sculptor, and Keats insisted on his delivering it at once and losing no opportunity of making acquaintances in Rome that might be useful to him, and no time in getting to work on his projected compet.i.tion picture, 'The Death of Alcibiades.' In Severn's absence Keats had a companion he liked in an invalid Lieutenant Elton. In their walks on the Pincian these two often met the famous beauty Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese. Her charms were by this time failing--but not for lack of exercise; and her melting glances at his companion, who was tall and handsome, presently affected Keats's nerves, and made them change the direction of their walks.

Sometimes, instead of walking, they would take short invalid rides, on hired mounts suited to their respective statures, about the Pincian or outside the Porta del Popolo, while Severn was working among the ruins.

The mitigation of Keats's sufferings lasted for some five weeks, and filled the anxious heart of Severn with hope. Nevertheless he could not but be aware of the deep-seated dejection in his friend which found expression now and again in word or act, as when he began reading a volume of Alfieri, but dropped it at the lines, too sadly applicable to himself:--

Misera me! sollievo a me non resta Altro che 'l pianto, ed il pianto e delitto.